Ratioed Plugin Help

This plugin provides moderators with additional statistics about the behaviour of users. These may be useful as early warning signs that warrant more carefully watching the behaviour of a user. They are not suitable as a trigger for instantly blocking, muting, or reporting a user, since they lack context.

The name of the plugin comes from "The Ratio", a well-known quick rule of thumb:

If the Replies:RT ratio is greater than 2:1, you done messed up.

To "get ratioed" is to receive a large number of comments in a short space of time, with relatively few likes or boosts. If commenters were enthusiastic about the posts, they would also have liked or boosted them. Receiving many comments without such likes or boosts indicates the comments were probably angry. This anger may or may not be justified, but either way this is probably something moderators should be aware of.

This plugin allows viewing of an actual ratio, calculated over the last 24 hours. This is a useful timeframe for sudden dogpiling events that moderators might not otherwise notice. The plugin also calculates other statistics.

Explanation of Statistics

Blocked by

This summarises the number of users on remote servers that have blocked this user.

Note that the ActivityPub spec expressly says that implementations "SHOULD NOT" forward such block messages to remote servers. Nevertheless some implementations do this anyway, notably Mastodon. This statistic can only count block messages from servers that do this, as well as blocks from local users. As such, it is usually an undercount.

The reason the spec recommends against forwarding these messages is that they can lead to retaliation. For this reason, this plugin deliberately does not provide any way to investigate exactly who blocked the user.

Comments last 24h

This gives the number of comments made on the top-level posts that this user made within the last 24 hours.

Reactions last 24h

This collects the number of likes, boosts, or other "one-click" interactions made on the user's top-level posts within the last 24 hours.

Ratio last 24h

This is the ratio between "Comments last 24h" and "Reactions last 24h". It is intended to approximate the traditional ratio as understood on Twitter.

Replies last month

This is the number of times the user posted a reply to someone else, on a thread the user did not start, any time in the last month.

Reply likes

This is the number of likes received by the user on their replies to other people's posts in the last month. Replies that receive likes can be assumed to be more of a valuable contribution than replies that do not.

Respondee likes

The number of times in the last month the user replied to someone else's comment and that person then liked the reply. Likes to replies are not necessarily a positive thing, but if the person you're replying to approves the reply, that's a very good sign. Of course it's also common in a debate for neither side to like the other side's comments without that indicating an unhealthy interaction, so interpret this statistic cautiously.

OP likes

The number of times in the last month the user replied on a thread and the original poster that started the thread liked the reply. While there is no formal concept of "ownership" of a thread, conventionally the original poster is assumed to have started the thread for a reason, and making replies that do not fulfil that purpose are bad etiquette. Getting approval from the original poster therefore is a good sign that the user is posting replies that are wanted.

Reply guy score

A "reply guy" is a common Internet phenomenon of people (disproportionately male) posting unwanted comments on other (disproportionately female) people's threads, derailing the conversation. This score loosely quantifies this phenomenon, as the ratio betwen the number of replies and the sum of likes, respondee likes, and OP likes. This formula gives extra weight to particularly relevant likes: a reply to a top-level post that is liked by the original poster scores the maximum of 3 "points". A score above 1.0 might indicate cause for concern for moderators.

Since this is indicative of long-term behaviour, the score is calculated over a month instead of 24 hours.

Performance

The statistics are computed from scratch each time the page loads. It's possible that this might put a heavy load on the database, and the page may take a long time to load.

Extending

Suggestions for additional statistics are welcome, especially from moderators. This plugin should be considered a sandbox for experimentation, so it is not necessary to prove that any statistic is correlated with unwanted behaviour.

However, this plugin does deal with potentially sensitive information. Even if moderators do in principle have access to all information, it should not necessarily be highlighted. Statistics should be kept anonymous and neutral. Also, they should be presented only to moderators, not to the users themselves.